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> Remove individual metrics or performance indicators, make team success the important goal.

This just moves the competitive boundary between teams, rather than individuals. It's not unheard of teams that compete and sabotage each other to make their project the most important and impactful.

Sure. The next logical step is to remove team metrics and performance indicators, and make departmental success the important goal.

Then switch deparmental for organisation-wide, then that for nation-wide, then that for world-wide.

The issue with that approach is that incentives are not always aligned. Not everyone is an altruist willing to give up their personal self-interest for the good of the company.

For example, you might have a legacy team whose future headcount growth is negatively impacted by a new team. Whether because this new team is automating tasks of the legacy team, or building a product that will cannibalize sales.

From the perspective of the company, the legacy team should embrace the future and allow themselves to be creatively destroyed.

But in reality, you have some leaders who do not want to give up power and will try to hold on, optimizing for personal incentives.

That's not a problem if the people in the old team understand that their security is tied up with the success of the organisation. I.e. if the new team does well, the organisation does well, and all employees are cared for.

If somehow the people in the old team get into their heads the idea that organisation-wide success stands in conflict with their security, then you have a problem.

But the problem is with management, not the people on the teams.

Edit: in general, it's a common disease in companies to associate people with teams rather than the organisation. People don't become useless because their previous roles are obsoleted. Those are still valuable people and sure, there's a cost to retraining them, but the cost to letting them go (in terms of what it teaches the rest of your employees) is so much greater. (Though unfortunately harder to measure.)

We can thank Jack Welch of GE for that attitude. I thought the same thing in the 80’s when GE was shedding thousands of employees. That those employees should be useable for new endeavors. Turns out retraining is a cost the company can externalize with firings

I’d say that the logical conclusion is that KPI’s are the problem here.

Let the team measure themselves, bit give them a clear mandate and shared purpose.

When teams are incomparable, no such rivalry can make sense.

Each “step” reduces an individual’s power in determining the outcome, and thus their responsibility and commitment. People also know some intuitive game theory; They won’t take an excessive burden for a shared prize, as that will ultimately burn them out in the long run.

> make team success the important goal

That leads to the prisoner's dilemma and tragedy of the commons. When team success is the goal, slackers thrive.

> > make team success the important goal

> That leads to the prisoner's dilemma and tragedy of the commons. When team success is the goal, slackers thrive.

Teams have lifecycles too, so there are dynamics of team selection and teammate selection that can help with those problems.

Does that encourage effort or mediocrity though?

As if my additional efforts are not going to move the needle much and there is nothing individually for me to win, why not just enjoy the ride?

Enjoying the ride is miles better than sabotaging your team.

Teams don't work in a vacuum and it's not that hard to eventually find the slacker in a team. But you have team goals and individual goals. Team performance management and individual one. This is where good management comes in, to find a way to engage and motivate even a slacker, to get them to deliver at least the same amount of value you put in them.

If the easy things fail (usually the financial or flexibility kind) there are other options. Find them the same position in a different team with different dynamics (a great individual can sink if everyone else on the team is much better, or much worse), find them a different position where they can shine (you can start as a mediocre midfielder and end up a successful goalkeeper), or even have them find a different job entirely.

Recent research shows that financial and other extrinsic motivators actually inhibit performance.

After a worker has achieved a base level of income that makes their life comfortable, any extra treats they receive will decrease their interest in the core function of their work, moving their focus to the extrinsic motivator instead.

I've also heard interpretations of this effect that explain it as: being rewarded can demean the value of work, because it may feel as though the work itself is a chore that nobody would do unless they got rewarded.

In general, I believe that extrinsic motivators lead employees to follow their instincts less and focus on anything that will net them a reward. This means that even if someone has a great idea for improving some aspect of the work a company is doing, it might not get done. They are instead being rewarded for whatever arbitrary KPI that management has decided is important.

In fields where there is a single clear KPI, all processes are mature, management has a clear view of the entire value chain, and workers are focused on a single task that is highly tied to the KPI --- e.g. yields in manufacturing tied to a production line worker --- sure, rewarding high KPI is not a terrible idea (or at least as terrible as it would be otherwise). But whenever a workers focus can be co-opted by bonuses I believe bonuses tied to KPIs are a bad idea.

RE: your second point, I absolutely agree. How well a person "fits" in a team has a high impact on a person's motivation.

what research are you referring to?

It seems I have to qualify "recent", this was already studied in the 70's [1]. But recent material is available as well [2],[3],[4],[6]. [3] provides a view from an economists perspective (incentives), [6] looks at motivation of employees and compares to performance and well-being outcomes. The psychological question is about intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation, and has been studied for a long time now, for an overview, see [5] or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation

1. "The Effects of Contingent and Noncontingent Rewards and Controls on Intrinsic Motivation", 1972, Edward L.Deci, [Available online] http://selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/1972_Deci_O...

2. Punished by Rewards, Alfie Kohn, 1999, https://www.alfiekohn.org/punished-rewards/

3. "Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation ", Roland Bénabou & Jean Tirole, 2003, https://academic.oup.com/restud/article-abstract/70/3/489/15...

4. Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation - The Search for Optimal Motivation and Performance, Carol Sansone & Judith Harackiewicz, 2000 https://www.amazon.com/Intrinsic-Extrinsic-Motivation-Perfor...

5. "Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation", Lisa Legault, 2016, [Available online] http://www.lcwu.edu.pk/ocd/cfiles/Professional%20Studies/FC/...

6. "Do intrinsic and extrinsic motivation relate differently to employee outcomes?", Kuvaas et al., 2017, [Available online] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bard_Kuvaas/publication...

EDIT: added more recent sources

But you're ignoring the "demotivating" factors. Getting a pay bump might not be a (good) motivator in itself but it may remove a demotivator. So sometime these moves are to release the handbrake rather than make the engine more powerful.

That's correct, that's why I said financial motivators don't matter _after_ you already have a comfortable life (your needs are satisfied). [1] and [6] both argue that rewards that aren't conditioned on performance (e.g. salary) don't detract from intrinsic motivation and that a competitive salary is a good motivator.

> financial motivators don't matter _after_ you already have a comfortable life

Oh, this is a slightly different topic. Of course if your belly is growling money will motivate you a lot, and that motivation tends to go down the more you go past your comfort baseline.

But think of pay disparity for example. Maybe your belly is full but your slacker colleague is making more money than you. That has a good chance of demotivating you, making you ask "why should I try harder?". Reducing this disparity and (perceived) inequity, eliminating the demotivating factor, goes a long way and has a far longer lasting effect than just the same extra money would bring otherwise.

I totally agree, salaries aren't bad, bonuses are.

And pay disparity can be a problem, especially if salary data is hidden. I think most of the time the problem is a lack of openness about salaries and why they are as they are.

Because you don't want to be the one who is dragging down your friends. Because you are proud of providing a first-class service. Because people depend on your effort.

Its up to the rest of the team to realose you are not pulling your weight

> Remove individual metrics or performance indicators, make team success the important goal.

Why would a high performer stay there? The rest of the team drags him down and there is nothing he can do about it, he will just leave for a position where he doesn't have to pick up the slack of the entire team before he gets acknowledged.

It depends on the specific context of course, but I think there's a fallacy in the assumption that the high performer can perform better than a well working team would. A business is also an organism with many moving parts, if you optimize for just one particular metric and hire high performance individuals based on that, you end up neglecting the other parts of the organisation.

Either way you can make that decision, perhaps your particular business is better off with high performing individuals. Like a door-to-door sales company probably doesn't benefit that much from team dynamics, and you'd definitely get slackers in that context. But a software team more often than not gets impacted negatively by a rockstar billowing out code rather than organizing with the team.